Data journalism is, among other things, the art of resisting the temptation to show spectacular visualisations that fail to highlight the data behind a story.

Insights and relevant statistics can get lost in visual translation, so Thomas de Beus’ Colourful Facts is a great place to start thinking more about clarity and your audience — and less about spectacular graphic design (although you do not want to forego attractiveness entirely). Continue reading →

Increasingly you might come across an interesting set of interactive charts from a public body, or an interactive map, and you want to grab the data behind it in order to ask further questions. In many cases you don’t need to do any scraping — you just need to know where to look. In this post I explain how to work out where the data is being fetched from…Continue reading →

Full Fact report that the Department of Health is to give press officers data so they can field press enquiries about claims made in ministerial speeches:

“An internal ‘data document’ will provide press officers with links to sources for each factual claim made in a speech, as well as contact details for the official or analyst who provided the information.”

It’s an important move, and given that it comes in response to a body (the UK Statistics Authority) which has also rebuked other arms of government for misusing stats, you might expect other departments to follow.

Of course, it relies on journalists being aware that this exists, being willing to ask for the data, and able to interrogate it (or its author). Another on the list for the case for data literacy.